– An estimated one-third of all the food produced in the world is left uneaten at a cost of up to $400 billion a year in waste disposal and other government costs.

– Food discarded by consumers and retailers in just the most developed nations would be more than enough to sustain all the world’s 870 million hungry people if effective distribution methods were available.

I would not find the President’s veto of the Keystone XL pipeline so off kilter if the process itself were on kilter. It wasn’t.

This project was studied and studied and studied again — with the sole purpose of slow walking it into limbo. It worked. No one can tell you what the next step will be. And if I were sitting on the Canadian side of the border, I’d be distressed by the lack of forthrightness every step of the way.

Put aside the claims of 42,000 jobs. That’s always been overstated. Those jobs would never have been permanent jobs. Focus on the fact that oil and gas will be part of the global energy mix, and shipping through pipelines is much safer than by rail through the heart of small towns all over America. Prime case: the recent derailment in West Virginia.

How many ways can a school administration shoot itself in the foot before it can no longer walk? I suspect Mike Miles’ administration is getting awkwardly close to that moment.

Here’s the short version of a much longer version. The bottom line is that the DISD school board and superintendent Mike Miles can’t seem to go more than a few weeks without an existential crisis of trust.

The latest crisis is whether Miles and/or people acting on his behalf misled the school board, hired too many teachers with budget funds not in place, and then stonewalled the board into authorizing the funds after the fact based on a fictional account of events.

I’m thankful we get just a couple of these ice monsters a year. I can handle snow and cold weather, but ice is so insidious. You can fight it, but are likely to lose.

So this morning, I put on a couple of layers of socks, a warm sweater and sipped on coffee — at home. Being stranded would be lot more fun if I were at a ski resort. At home, I get the ice and still have to empty the garbage and make sure the dogs go outside — while writing. And on icy days like this, you can’t even make a snowball for relief.

Working at home on a snow day isn’t easy. At times, I wonder whether braving icy roads to get to work would be better. Then I remember my son’s decision to drive to school during last year’s storm. In fact, my insurance company loved that decision; they remind me every month just how much so.

The district wanted an investigation into whether DISD trustee Bernadette Nutall harassed a district administrator. The reported compiled by former U.S. Attorney Paul Coggins found no wrongdoing but lots of pettiness.

From the allegations, Nutall is seen as intimidating, aggressive and tacky. However, the allegations fell apart during the investigation. So we have to ask as we did five months ago: is this really worth the time and ($30,000 minimum) of a former federal attorney?

Now we have page after page of mindless drama, and another reason for district parents to shakes their heads in disgust. The whole school district should be embarrassed. However, I don’t know whether anyone at Ross Avenue knows the meaning of that word.

The most underreported story of the past week might very well be the disclosure of massive banking cyber-thefts around the globe. And it is underreported because as ugly as this appears to be, banks would rather eat the losses — estimated in the billions of dollars — than face reputational loss and consumer backlash. In some ways, that makes cracking down on this elusive, ever evolving new threat more problematic.

Last week, President Obama signed an executive order urging greater corporate attention to cyber-theft. I sense that is like issuing a statement opposing auto accidents. Great intentions but not necessarily a difference maker.

The president’s order comes in the midst of news that a Russian gang of computer criminals has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars since late 2013 from banks in Russia, Eastern Europe and the U.S. Countries hit include Russia, the U.S., Germany, China, Ukraine, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Romania, France, Spain, Norway, India, the U.K., Poland, Pakistan, Nepal, Morocco, Iceland, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Brazil, Bulgaria and Australia. That’s very broadly based and of an amazing scale.

During his time as attorney general, now-Gov. Greg Abbott made his lawsuits against the Obama administration — 31 in total — a point of pride. The attorney general’s office provided cost estimates for 29 of the cases, which totaled about $4.25 million.

So what did Texans get for their money?

Based on court rulings, Texas has definitively won five of those cases. In 10 cases, the courts ruled against the state. Nine cases are still pending, and the AG’s office withdrew the remaining seven.

If this were a heavyweight boxing match, the Feds would be winning on points.

Walmart has led corporate America in deploying PV panels. Almost all have been rooftop installations at store and corporate office locations. It has held the top spot for solar power capacity use for at least the past three years, according to Ken Johnson, vice president of communications with the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA).

Apple already has several large solar power installations around the U.S. Its largest, the 100-acre solar field in Maiden, N.C., boasts 14MW of capacity for its nearby data center. In 2013, Apple announced plans to build an 18MW solar plant to power a new data center in Reno.

What I like about DISD superintendent Mikes Miles is also what I find so infuriating about him. He’s a guy who sticks to messaging (that’s good) but often delivers it in the opaque language of education experts. That’s bad, really bad.

One of the moments occurred today when Miles appeared before the Editorial Board to discuss his proposal to create a “public facility corporation,” a special entity to issue bonds to accelerate long overdue improvements to facilities. The district, he said, can’t wait for a regular bond election; it needs to get moving on facility improvements that link up with district initiatives, such as early childhood and Pre-K programs, school choice and career readiness. His bottom line is the district has old buildings that are inadequate for these needs and can’t wait for a protracted bond election to address the district’s vast physical plant needs.

That I get. This school district has to modernize and make sure it has state-of-the art assets in the right places. But since he is also looking to accomplish this alignment of facilities and programs through a debt- issuing public facility corporation, I wanted to hear just how this would work. On that score, he punted the financial considerations to his CFO, Jim Terry, who was not present. It felt as though he was avoiding the elephant in the room question. And that seems also to be how trustees responded to a similar presentation, as reported in this newspaper.

Miles told the trustees that the corporation is the fastest way to start on immediate projects while the district decides later how to finance the rest of a proposed $1.5 billion package.

“We’ll still need to do something for the most-critical-needs buildings, and pretty quickly and not three years from now,” he said.

The board could vote on the proposal this month.

Several trustees said they were still trying to understand how such a corporation would operate and whether it would be a prudent way to spend taxpayer money. Unlike a voter-approved bond package, DISD would have to repay these bonds from its general fund, which is used to pay teacher salaries and for curriculum and other operations.

Confusion and questions are inevitable. The debt is likely to be short-term, which by definition would make it more expensive than traditional bond debt. Presumably, it would refinanced to a better rate, assuming of course that the historic low interest rates are still low when it comes time refinance.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that Miles is selling the big picture without offering enough of those complicated financial and governance details. This was a great opportunity for an uncontested shot on goal with me had I just heard a few more nuts and bolts. Credit Miles for an innovative idea, but ding him for not sealing the deal on the pesky parts of this proposal.

In case you missed it, FBI director James Comey today delivered what the NYTimes characterized as ”an unusually frank speech about the relationship between the police and black people, saying that officers who work in neighborhoods where blacks commit crimes at higher rates develop a cynicism that shades their attitudes about race.”

What an amazing understanding of reality from Comey, whose speech can be found on the FBI’s website here. It is worth reading.

According to the Times, Comey said officers — whether they are white or any other race — who are confronted with white men on one side of the street and black men on the other do not view them the same way. The officers develop a mental shortcut that “becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights” because of the number of black suspects they have arrested.

“We need to come to grips with the fact that this behavior complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve,” Mr. Comey said in the speech, at Georgetown University.

Comey then went into research about unconscious racial bias and said law enforcement needs “to design systems and processes to overcome that very human part of us all. Although the research may be unsettling, what we do next is what matters most,” he said.

I’m glad to hear this from a major law enforcement officer, partly because it makes points I made in a recent post following New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s story of his son’s mistaken identity encounter with a campus police officer. But my ego aside, the Comey “gets it.” He was under no pressure to give this sort of speech, which would rekindle discussion about Michael Brown, Eric Garner and the slayings of two police officers in New York, but he did.

I’m also pleased Comey took another step to say that officers are “not the root cause of problems in our hardest-hit neighborhoods,” where blacks grow up “in environments lacking role models, adequate education and decent employment.” It is welcome bit of perspective — not an excuse, but perspective – that can go along way to tamp down community/police ill-will.

I don’t know how deep his comments will trickle, either within the FBI or within local police departments. I welcome his voice because every voice that can improve police community relationships should speak up.

After the last stock market meltdown, top Wall Street executives received bonuses or golden parachutes even as their organizations crashed. Some argued that these organizations needed to retain talent to implement a turnaround. Never mind that the disaster occurred on these executives’ watch and their accounting voodoo contributed to the meltdown. And of course, rank-and-file workers, the foot soldiers, became cannon fodder.

Add RadioShack to a list of companies practicing dual standards under duress. This story by DMN business reporter Maria Halkias says that two months before RadioShack’s bankruptcy filing last week, the company revised its severance policy from a lump sum to weekly or biweekly payments. The net impact is that former workers now are competing with a long list of RadioShack creditors from banks to suppliers.

While that is a kick in the teeth, it wouldn’t be so ugly if the entire organization shared the pain. However, the same story notes that “RadioShack asked the bankruptcy court to approve up to $3 million in bonuses for about 40 “key” employees it says are working to sell off and auction its 4,100 stores.” But that’s a little deceiving. The bulk of the bonuses would go to eight executives.

Interestingly, the story notes that only 14 percent of companies surveyed late last year said they don’t have a severance program. The most common consideration for the amount of severance received (92 percent) is still years of service.

There is always a mad dash for a limited pool of dollars when a company finds itself in bankruptcy court. But promises never seem to be kept unless these were made to he corporate braintrust.

Broad Foundation recently decided to suspend its annual award for best urban education after it discovered that large urban districts nationwide aren’t showing academic gains or closing the achievement gap fast enough. This is a good decision, and an opportunity for districts, researchers and Broad to rethink what in fact does move the needle.

I know the issue of class or district size and performance is controversial. Studies have indicated smaller classes are better, while other studies say class size doesn’t matter. Bill and Melinda Gates have tossed millions into the smaller school movement and has been criticized for not paying enough attention to the impact of small size before concluding size was a pivotal factor in achievement.

The strategy of more rigor in the classroom is not wrong, but changing decades of institutional and cultural barriers that come with mega- districts is not something that can accomplished overnight. In business terms, this is the difference between an exciting startup that can shift directions on a dime and an entrenched legacy company that has layers of bureaucracy between the decision-makers and worker bees.

This is probably the reason Broad will continue to award the $250,000 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools. The distance from the very top to the classroom is shorter.

Poverty aside, large districts face challenges smaller districts do not. or at least those problems are multiplied by size. Out-of-school factors like family income, education level of the mother, or whether or not a kid comes to school hungry and tired matter.

But while big districts produce economies of scale, they also mask inefficiencies and accountability. What makes a Harlem Children’s Zone successful is not just the wraparound services that keep kids and parents engaged; it is also the small classroom instruction that allows teachers to know each child by name and care about each child’s success. The larger the district, the greater the bureaucracy.

Far be it for me to anoint a school district, but this research from Stanford University about the Sanger Unified School District in California’s Central Valley is particularly interesting. Noted for its extreme poverty and prevalence of English learners, the district of just under 11,000 students has posted steady academic improvement and has a decade-long tack record of closing achievement gaps. The Stanford researchers credit a strategy that the researchers said flies in the face of most district reform efforts.

Rather than adopting new curriculum and monitoring fidelity or bringing in private vendors, top Sanger leaders set out to fundamentally change the culture of the district:

- From focus on adults to focus on students

- From following textbooks to diagnosing student needs

-From professional isolation to collaboration and shared responsibility

-From top-down to reciprocal accountability

-From leaders as managers to leaders of learning

These are poverty specific achievement strategies, that large districts have greater difficulty implementing and sustaining. Sanger serves about the same number of students as the Harlem Children’s Zone and operates on similar principles. Sanger is rural and Harlem is urban. You don’t have to go to the East Coast or West Coast to see success. The Uplift Education and Kipp schools prove this point.

I may be taking this a step too far, but I’m guessing Broad expected the stuff that worked in small districts would succeed at the same pace in larger districts. If there is a magic bullet, it comes from great teachers seeking excellence from small controllable classes. Unfortunately, that is very difficult to achieve when you have more than 100,000 students, tens of thousands of teachers of varying skill levels, and administrators who may or may not be in touch with the realities in the classroom.

If you check with health officials across the nation, you’ll find two main reasons for the comeback in the United States –people who don’t vaccinate their children and foreign visitors who haven’t been vaccinated.

In a week when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, both 2016 presidential hopefuls, have tripped all over themselves to avoid offending the anti-vaccination crowd, it is nice to see a Republican in Texas demonstrate basic common sense on this issue.

“We are just saying, ‘Look, if you are going to send your children to public schools, they need to be vaccinated,’” Villalba said. “We are going to ask that you keep other children safe.”

Students would still be able to receive medical waivers if an allergic reaction or a weakened immune system could cause health complications. But “I don’t want to” or “I have my rights” wouldn’t cut it anymore.

Finally, a week that started with vaccine lunacy is ending on a reasonable tone.

You have to be of a certain age to care about RadioShack. And you also had to have been a bit of a geek before that word entered our language.

There was a time you went to RadioShack because your father wanted to share a craft with you, say assembling a homemade shortwave radio to pull in stations from the around the world.

This is a project I shared with my father, who learned about radios as a soldier in World War II. I remember the many colored wires and springs, and holding the soldering iron to melt connections into place. And the radio worked, even if we had stuff over and it needed a special antenna on the roof which required me to locate it close to a window I could raise.

I listened nightly — the only time I could get an exotic signal — maneuvering through time chimes and Morse code until I could find a broadcast in English. My father could decipher the rapid-fire dot-dash-dot-dash of Morse code. I was clueless, but watched in amazement.

That was before there was an app for that, when phones had rotary dialing and phone numbers still began with letters.

Ultimately, that was RadioShack’s problem. It remained an analog geek supply shop for solderers in a generation of digital coding geeks. It saw the future, like a waif with nose pressed against the glass, but never really cracked the code. It called itself a technology center, but that was really just a fancy name for a retailer that sold remote control cars and batteries.

I was a technology business journalist in the 1980s as RadioShack cast its fortunes into making computers and tried to hold on against Compaq, Dell, IBM, and a young Apple that could just as easily landed in technology’s trash bin. Even after countless efforts to rebrand itself, RadioShack remained mostly a one-trick pony. Arguably, its most amazing accomplishment is that lasted as long as it did.

The company was not a child of the technology revolution, of the technology Meccas of Boston, New York and the Silicon Valley despite trying to claim that heritage. It begin as supplier of leather shoe parts and related supplies to repair shops in the years after World War I and grew with the advent of radio and the phonograph. The sure signs of technology success are the tech start-ups that trace their DNA to RadioShack. There just aren’t many. And what I offers can be found at dozens of other store, online or in malls.

What possesses a top-flight broadcaster to embellish a successful career with a fabrication about “taking fire” while in a combat zone? I don’t get it. But I didn’t get it either when Hillary Clinton told a similar tall tale of dodging snipers in Bosnia.

And then the Twitterverse has chimed in with some hilarious Williams-as-witness-to history moments under #BrianWilliamsWarStories or #BrianWilliamsMisremembers. Here are a couple mentioned in the column.

@oldpathsguide: “I will never forget the look on the faces of the citizens of Troy when we jumped out of the horse.” #BrianWilliamsWarStories

@AustinCSmith1: “So there I was, tensions were high but it was an honor to cover the Surrender at Appomattox.” #BrianWilliamsWarStories.

We all can forget sequences of events and even precipitating events. But how do you get confused about whether you were on a military helicopter that people with weapons wanted to blow up? I might forget the precise time of day, or the city, but not the attack itself. It is not as though Brian Williams has endured so many assaults that he might get a little mixed up.

Kass says it well.

Politicians are often encouraged to look us right in the eye and lie their socks off. So we’ll read their lips when they say no new taxes. We’ll listen as he shakes that finger and declares he never had sex with that woman.

Or that if we want to keep our health care, we can keep our health care, period.

But liars aren’t celebrated in journalism, and TV network anchors — for all their great hair and teeth — call themselves journalists.

The world is filled with unwanted sequels to movies and books, most which take inane themes and ride them until they drop from exhaustion.

But I’m looking forward to this sequel of sorts, Harper Lee’s first book since “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Called “Go Set a Watchman,” it was completed in the 1950s and takes place 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus,” says the publisher’s announcement. “She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.”

Sounds like a fascinating self-discovery. I hope it transcends the years as did “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

I just don’t get why Nationwide Insurance is taking such a social media beating for its very edgy Super Bowl commercial about preventable accidents.

The commercial starts innocently enough with a cute kid listing all the things he won’t be able to do, then turns dark when the kid announces to the audience that he died in a preventable accident.

The commercial continues with Nationwide showing examples of preventable accidents that take the lives of youngsters: a child left unattended in a bathtub, a big screen television that has tipped onto a toddler, storage of hazardous household chemicals within reach of small hands. Nothing sensationalized. Just simple graphic reminders.

The social media consensus is that airing the commercial during the Super Bowl was tacky, disgusting, a cheap attempt to sell insurance etc. Somehow Nationwide comes off as the bad guys, and for the life of me, I don’t know why.

In different ways, each of the Super Bowl commercials speak to responsibility. If taking a few seconds during a football game to drive home these points upsets viewers, then I think that is good.

A dose of reality is in order. What good is a message if it is not seen? Would those who hate the commercials prefer that these air at 2 a.m.? Is that more comfortable? Having a tough message delivered to a large national audience is the essence of communication. And if these commercials make you think about your own behaviors in a new light, then I’d say that they’ve accomplished their missions.

Among other things, agency executives now must sign off on any contract over $1 million and employees involved in procurement or contract management must disclose any possible conflicts of interest.

This stuff might seem to be no-brainers, but having the governor directly support openness in procurement when he easily could have straddled the fence is a positive signal. It also sends a signal that Abbott expects all state agencies to use a competitive bidding process not only when it is required by law but also at most other times.

But since nothing ever occurs in a vacuum, it is worth peeling back the layers of this onion to note that this sudden burst of openness comes in the midst of a contracting scandal at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission involving Executive Commissioner Kyle Janek and others. Janek’s chief of staff, Erica Stick, and her husband, Jack, the commission’s chief counsel, are out, and Janek’s employment status is in limbo pending ongoing reviews of the agency.

Abbott’s reforms are a good start and set a tone that hopefully reminds state employees that they work for the people of Texas. Just remember though that this sudden accountability didn’t materialize from out of the blue.

And just when you thought that we might get into this Texas Legislative session without some foolish stunt to make Texas a national laughing stock.

Enter Rep. Molly White, R-Belton, who on her FaceBook page, directed staffers to ask Muslim visitors in to the Capitol for the seventh annual Texas Muslim Capitol Day to pledge allegiance to the U.S.

“I did leave an Israeli flag on the reception desk in my office with instructions to staff to ask representatives from the Muslim community to renounce Islamic terrorist groups and publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws,” she said on Facebook. “We will see how long they stay in my office.”

On top of that, about 200 Muslims intending to speak with legislators about the session were heckled by about 30 ”Christian protesters,” who shouted such mindless things as ”Islam will never dominate the United States and by the grace of God it will not dominate Texas.” Throughout the rally, Muslim children became upset when protesters shouted “get out” and “ISIS will gladly welcome you.”

So much for a warm Austin welcoming. It doesn’t get more hostile than this.

I wonder whether the protesters understand any part of Christianity, the Constitution, or what it means to be an American and whether White realizes she has made a fool of herself with streams of intolerance. It’s been a long time since I last heard a lawmaker so aggressively demonstrate such arrogance and insensitivity than White’s swear-allegiance-to the-U.S.-request.

Within two hours of her post, many criticized the freshman tea party Republican, which restores a bit of my faith in humanity. As for White, she says: “Folks, I am banning users that are insulting and not in my District. I do not apologize for my comments above.”

I guess she exercises the right to insult, but can’t stand the heat tossed back at her.

The good thing about America is that we live in a place that allows us to elect our representatives. The bad thing is someone like Molly White gets a platform.

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The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board was the first editorial board in the nation to use a blog to openly discuss hot topics and issues among its members and with readers. Our intent is to pull back the curtain on the daily process of producing the unsigned editorials that reflect the opinion of the newspaper, and to share analysis and opinion on issues of interest to board members and invited guest bloggers.